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Excerpt: The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child?s bed....

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Excerpt: Introduction To Guy Mannering. The novel or romance of Waverley made its way to the public slowly, of course, at first, but afterwards with such accumulating popularity as to encourage the author to a second attempt. He looked about for a name and a subject; and the manner in which the novels were composed cannot be better illustrated than by reciting the simple narrative on which Guy Mannering was originally founded; but to which, in the progress of the work, the production ceased to bear any, even the most distant resemblance....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. How Sir Mordred presumed and took on him to be King of England, and would have married the queen, his father?s wife As Sir Mordred was ruler of all England, he did do make letters as though that they came from beyond the sea, and the letters specified that King Arthur was slain in battle with Sir Launcelot. Wherefore Sir Mordred made a parliament, and called the lords together, and there he made them to choose him king; and so was he crowned at Canterbury, and held a feast there fifteen days; and afterward he drew him unto Winchester, and there he took the Queen Guenever, and said plainly that he would wed her which was his uncle?s wife and his father?s wife....

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Excerpt: Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine, That all this famous antique history, Of some th?aboundance of an idle braine Will iudged be, and painted forgery, Rather then matter of iust memory, Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, Where is that happy land of Faery, Which I so much do vaunt, yet no where show, But vouch antiquities, which no body can know....

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Excerpt: [The curtain rises on a stage set for a Harlequinade, a merry black and white interior. Directly behind the footlights, and running parallel with them, is a long table, covered with a gay black and white cloth, on which is spread a banquet. At the opposite ends of this table, seated on delicate thin-legged chairs with high backs, are Pierrot and Columbine, dressed according to the tradition, excepting that Pierrot is in lilac, and Columbine in pink. They are dining.]...

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Excerpt: An Old Monastery. ?COME, deputy of the Centre, forward! Quick step! march! if we want to be in time to dine with the others. Jump, marquis! there, that?s right! why, you can skip across a stubble-field like a deer!?...

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Excerpt: The Reef by Edith Wharton.

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Excerpt: The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume One.

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Contents EARLY POEMS.............................................................................................................................. 12 STANZA, WRITTEN AT BRACKNELL................................................................................................................. 12 STANZAS.?APRIL, 1814........................................................................................................................................ 13 TO HARRIET. ........................................................................................................................................................... 14 TO MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN. ....................................................................................................... 15 TO ?. ......................................................................................................................................................................... 16 MUTABILITY............................................................................................................................................................ 16 ON DEATH. ..............................

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Excerpt: Returning Home by Anthony Trollope.

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. It had occurred to her early that in her position-- that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie-- she should know a great many persons without their recognizing the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively--though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered--to see any one come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her function. Her function was to sit there with two young men--the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the ?sounder,? which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing. This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the narrow counter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corne...

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Excerpt: The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope: Volume One, with Memoir, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes by the Rev. George Gilfillan.

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Contents LIFE OF ALEXANDER POPE.................................................................................................................................. 6 PREFACE2................................................................................................................................................................. 25 VARIATIONS IN THE AUTHOR?S MANUSCRIPT PREFACE. ........................................................................ 31 PASTORALS, WITH A DISCOURSE ON PASTORAL POETRY. WRITTEN IN THE YEAR MDCCIV...... 32 SPRING ...................................................................................................................................................................... 37 SUMMER ................................................................................................................................................................... 41 AUTUMN ................................................................................................................................................................... 44 WINTER .............................................................................

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Excerpt: The French Revolution. (INDEX)

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INDEX ABBAYE, massacres, Jourgniac, Sicard, and Maton?s account of. ACCEPTATION, grande, by Louis XVI. AGOUST, Captain d?, seizes two Parlementeers. AIGUILLON, d?, at Quiberon, account of, in favour, at death of Louis XV. AINTRIGUES, Count d?. ALTAR of Fatherland in Champ-de-Mars, scene at, christening at....

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Excerpt: There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys....

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Excerpt: Old Moodie. The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Boarding-House. Mrs. Tibbs was, beyond all dispute, the most tidy, fidgety, thrifty little personage that ever inhaled the smoke of London; and the house of Mrs. Tibbs was, decidedly, the neatest in all Great Coram-street. The area and the area-steps, and the street-door and the street-door steps, and the brass handle, and the door-plate, and the knocker, and the fan-light, were all as clean and bright, as indefatigable white-washing, and hearth-stoning, and scrubbing and rubbing, could make them....

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Excerpt: ?Halloa! Below there!? When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about, and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what. But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all....

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Contents: The Signal-Man The Haunted-House The Trial For Murder

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Excerpt: In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in....

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Excerpt: Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence.

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Excerpt: The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.

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Excerpt: One day--and that day was many years ago now--I received a long, chatty letter from one of my old chums and fellow wanderers in Eastern waters. He was still out there, but settled down, and middle-aged; I imagined him--grown portly in figure and domestic in his habits; in short, overtaken by the fate common to all except to those who, being specially beloved by the gods, get knocked on the head early. The letter was of the reminiscent ?do you remember? kind--a wistful letter of backward glances. And, amongst other things, ?surely you remember old Nelson,? he wrote....